Child of God(4)

passed and stove his bare toes on its bony rump. He was hopping about on one foot shrieking when a final hound entered the room. He fell upon it and seized its hind leg. It set up a piteous howling. Ballard flailed blindly at it with his fist, great drum like thumps that echoed in the near empty room among the desperate oaths and wailings. GOING UP A TRACK OF A road through the quarry woods where all about lay enormous blocks and tablets of stone weathered gray and grown with deep green moss, toppled II!0noliths among the trees and vines like traces of an older race of man. This rainy summer day. He passed a dark lake of silent jade where the moss walls rose sheer and plumb and a small blue bird sat slant upon a guy wire in the void. Ballard leveled the rifle at the bird but something of an old foreboding made him hold. Mayhaps the bird felt it too. It flew. Small. Tiny. Gone. The woods were filled with silence. Ballard let the hammer down with the ball of his thumb and wearing the rifle on his neck like a yoke with his hands dangling over barrel and buttstock he went up the quarry road. The mud packed with tins trod flat, with broken glass. The bushes strewn with refuse. Yonder through the woods a roof and smoke from a chimney. He came into a clearing where two cars lay upturned at either side of the road like wrecked sentinels and he went past great levees of junk and garbage toward the shack at the edge of the dump. An assortment of cats taking the weak sun watched him go. Ballard pointed the rifle at a large mottled tom and said bang. The cat looked at him without interest. It seemed to think him not too bright. Ballard spat on it and it immediately wiped the spittle from its head with a heavy forepaw and set about washing the spot. Ballard went on up the path through the trash and car parts. The dump keeper had spawned nine daughters and named them out of an old medical dictionary gleaned from the rubbish he picked. These gangling progeny with black hair hanging from their armpits now sat idle and wide-eyed day after day in chairs and crates about the little yard cleared out of the tips while their harried dam called them one by one to help with chores and one by one they shrugged or blinked their sluggard lids. Urethra, Cerebella, Hernia, Sue. They moved like cats and like cats in heat attracted surrounding swains to their midden until the old man used to go out at night and fire a shotgun at random just to clear the air. He couldn't tell which was the oldest or what age and he didn't know whether they should go out with boys or not. Like cats they sensed his lack of resolution. They were coming and going all hours in all manner of degenerate cars, a dissolute carousel of rotting sedans and niggerized convertibles with blue dot tail lamps and chrome horns and foxtails and giant dice or dashboard demons of spurious fur. All patched up out of parts and low slung and bumping over the ruts. Filled with old lanky country boys with long cocks and big feet. They fell pregnant one by one. He beat them. The wife cried and cried. There were three births that summer. The house was filling up, both rooms, the trailer. People were sleeping everywhere. One brought home what she said was a husband but he only stayed a day or two and they never saw him again. The twelve year old began to swell. The air grew close. Grew rank and fetid. He found a pile of rags in a corner. Small lumps of yellow shit wrapped up and laid by. One day in the woods and kudzu jungles on the far side of the dump he came across two figures humping away. He watched from behind a tree until he recognized one of his girls. He tried to creep up on them but the boy was wary and leaped up and was away through the woods

hauling up his breeches as he went. The old man began to beat the girl with the stick he carried. She grabbed it. He overbalanced. They sprawled together in the leaves. Hot fishy reek of her freshened loins. Her peach drawers hung from a bush. The air about him grew electric. Next thing he knew his overalls were about his knees and he was mounting her. Daddy quit, she said. Daddy. Oooh. Did he dump a load in you? No. He pulled it out and gripped it and squirted his jissom on her thigh. Goddamn you, he said. He rose and heisted up his overalls and lumbered off toward the dump like a bear. Then there was Ballard. He'd come up the path with his narrow eyed and studied indifference and the rifle in his hand or on his shoulders or he'd sit with the old man in the bloated sofa in the yard drinking with him from a half gallon jar of popskull whiskey and passing a raw potato back and forth for a chaser while the younger girls peeped and giggled from the shack. He had eyes for a long blonde flat shanked daughter that used to sit with her legs propped so that you could see her drawers. She laughed all the time. He'd never seen her in a pair of shoes but she had a different colored pair of drawers for every day of the week and black ones on Saturday. When Ballard came past the trailer this very one was hanging up wash. There was a man with her sitting on a fifty gallon drum and he turned and squinted at Ballard and spoke to him. The girl pursed her lips at him and winked and then threw back her head and laughed wildly. Ballard grinned, tapping the rifle barrel against the side of his leg. What say, jellybean, she said. What you laughin at? What you lookin at? Why, he's lookin at them there nice titties for one thing, said the man on the drum. You want to see em. Sure, said Ballard. Gimme a quarter. I ain't got one. She laughed. He stood there grinning. How much you got? I got a dime. Well go borry two and a half cents and you can see one of em. Just let me owe ye, said Ballard. Say you want to blow me? the girl said. I said owe, said Ballard, flushing. The man on the drum slapped his knee. Watch out, he said. What you got that Lester can see for a dime? He's done looked a half dollar's worth now. Shoot. I ain't seen nothin. You don't need to see nothin, she said, bending and picking up a wet piece of cloth from the dishpan and shaking it out, Ballard trying to see down the neck of her dress. She raised up. Just make your peter hard, she said, turning her back and laughing again that sudden half crazy laugh.